In light of this, the presence of great artists—and, at times, simply their association with particular venues and band positions—may create a special edge on the pressure of performances.17 Many recall their initial panic and rush of adrenalin when, as aspiring players, they first looked out at an audience to discover their own idols seated before them. Moreover, when matters of competition and music ownership are at stake, the identification of particular musicians in the audience can lead improvisers to alter their repertory or solos.18
Fellow musicians, as insiders in the audience, often have freedom of movement in a nightclub, making it possible for more pointed exchanges of advice to occur in relative privacy. In such encounters, players may go so far as to challenge each other’s fundamental values. For example, amid the turbulence of the sixties, as compelling ideas about social freedom, challenges to the status quo, and musical experimentation reinforced the interest avant-garde musicians in America had in extending the language of jazz, a debate intensified between them and bebop performers. Initial efforts at persuasion on either side were low-key at times. “Have you ever thought of playing free?” Omette Coleman once quizzed another saxophonist after briefly surprising him in the wings of the stage on which he had just completed a performance set. The question seemed altogether cryptic to the saxophonist, who had yet to learn about the free jazz movement.19
Comparable encounters may eventually assume the pitch of religious fervor. From the back of one club where a conventional group performed, a few free jazz musicians spoke loudly and critically, disparaging the music—for its lack of energy—as “emasculated bebop.” When a waitress complained about their disturbance, they raised their voices yet higher for the band’s benefit. “If our talking is covering the music,” one of them called out, “then how much music can be happening on stage?” An independent incident illustrates the opposite viewpoint. A pianist known among his followers as the “keeper of the flame of bebop” once arose from a nightclub audience and walked onto the stage, disrupting the performance of an avant-garde group. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he passionately addressed the rest of the audience, “what these guys are trying to do here, they’re not ready to do because they cannot even play conventionally. They can’t even play bebop, and I’m going to prove that to you.” With these opening remarks, he confronted the band members individually, demanding that each, in turn, perform “I Got Rhythm.” When they failed in their efforts, he turned once again to the audience and said imploringly, “That’s what I’m talking about!” (TT).
Other confrontations, revealing the overlapping spheres of social and musical change, spill over into the medium of music itself. At one club in San Francisco, a trio of African American musicians, dressed formally in suits and ties, played jazz standards. After a few pieces, they respectfully invited musicians in the audience to sit in with them. At once, a young trumpeter obviously steeped in the city’s vast counterculture—judging from his large Afro and the slogans on the buttons adorning his buckskin jacket—accepted the trio’s invitation. Joining the performance, he alternated his trumpet valves feverishly while blowing into the instrument with exceptional force, producing cascades of screaming patterns and superimposing them on the trio’s accompaniment. Angered and contemptuous, the rhythm section stopped performing and walked abruptly off the stage. The soloist took no notice, however, and continued to play by himself. After several minutes, when the performance showed no signs of abating, the pianist ran back to his instrument, pounded the keys erratically and bombastically, and cried out in exasperation: “Can’t you hear what you sound like, brother? This is what you sound like on your horn! Can’t you hear how bad you sound?” Seemingly unperturbed, the trumpeter brought his solo to a close and marched back onto the street, no doubt seeking other conventional bands to challenge with his free jazz style.
Between the extremes represented by contentious experts, on the one hand, and indifferent dinner club guests, on the other hand, the composition of an audience and the improviser-audience relationship can change throughout the evening, bringing about corresponding changes in performance on stage. At the Jazz Showcase one night, a renowned pianist opened his first set before a small audience that listened politely at times but generally carried on a patter of conversation. The pianist, too, seemed distracted, his attention drawn from the keyboard by periodic bursts of laughter in the audience. At times, as he improvised, he would exchange brief glances with anonymous audience members seated around the room. Throughout the set, he seemed to be holding himself back, playing perfunctorily. His solos were relatively short, and he played many compositions.
By the third set of the evening, however, a fundamental transformation had occurred. The club filled to capacity. Fellow musicians in the audience had introduced themselves to the pianist in between the sets, and as listeners they were, as the saying goes, hanging on his every note. The pianist, in turn, had warmed up and committed himself fully to the performance. Arched over the keyboard, he never raised his eyes from his instrument, nor paused to wipe the sweat from his brow. His improvisations were long, intricate, intense. Another artist in the audience who had remained in the club from the first set expressed his astonishment: “I can’t believe my ears. He’s like a completely different musician. I have never heard playing like this before!”
Recording Studios as Performance Settings
Opportunities to record enable groups to enhance their reputations by reaching a wider audience than through formal music events. In contrast to performance settings where improvisers interact with a live audience, recording studios present a characteristically severe atmosphere. However, with technological advances in recording, artists have potential to control the products of their performances before they reach listeners. In collaboration with studio and management personnel, improvisers manipulate the band’s sound in countless ways. By recording each instrument with individual microphones and running its signal through equalizers attached to the main recording deck, engineers can alter the instrument’s voice, rendering it, for example, richer and darker or thinner and brighter on the tape. They can also change the collective sound of a group by adding special effects like reverberation or manipulating the overall balance of separate recording tracks, possibly pulling back instrumental parts to highlight a singer’s words within the music, or pulling back the singer’s voice and treating it simply as another instrumental color.
In addition to its effect on the initial recorded performance, recording technology enables musicians to edit their taped material. They can overdub earlier performances, recording new parts and adding them to the music’s texture. Or they can re-record multiple versions of the exact same part, superimposing them on one another to thicken its sound. Alternatively, they can create a composite version of repeated performances by splicing together excerpts of particularly successful phrases from different takes to create an optimal solo or by combining the best sections of an ensemble’s renditions of a piece into a definitive version.20 Under certain circumstances, they can fuse portions of studio recordings together with highlights of live recorded performances. Such devices even allow contemporary artists to produce performances that exceed their natural technical abilities. They might record separately extensive introductions or cadenzas that, in and of themselves, would tax endurance to the limit, then splice them to the main body of improvised choruses so that they appear to be part of the same performance. Moreover, studio technicians can remove performance errors to replace them with corrected versions of problematic passages.
Many performers and groups take advantage of the studio’s editing capabilities because they recognize that the medium of recordings places them in a particularly vulnerable position as artists. Mistakes that passed unnoticed in the heat of live performances can detract from the music when subjected to repeated hearings. For all the value of such technological tools, however, improvisers are sometimes inclined to view them as crutches. Lou Donaldson never evaluates “musici
ans from their records. They are made under a different set of circumstances where they can make over what they don’t like. You have to hear musicians in person to be able to judge them.”
As a trade-off for the advantages they enjoy in the studio, players contend with numerous constraints that distinguish their performances from live events. Until relatively recently, the time constraints of a recording forced musicians to compress the length of presentations substantially. Lee Konitz recalls that the arrangements for Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool album “were between three and four minutes long. In those days, arrangements were written for one side of a 78 record.” Similarly, Max Roach has sometimes limited his own solos to “two choruses” on recordings with his band.
The convention of restricted performances carried over to varying degrees from 78s to long-playing 78s and 33 rpm recordings. Although the space on 33 rpm LPs could be used for open-ended improvisations within the structure of a single piece, the recording industry—interested in reissuing earlier material and, perhaps, in keeping close to the conventional lengths of cuts for popular music—most often used the format to record an increased number of short renditions of pieces. In the thirties, experimental recordings of Duke Ellington compositions and recordings of jam sessions in extended performances proved notable exceptions to this practice.21 Also unusual were such landmarks of the early avant-garde movement as Omette Coleman’s Free Jazz and John Coltrane’s Ascension, whose continuous performances occupy the complete sides of albums.
Pressures of recording lead some improvisers to restrain other features of their performances than their length. George Duvivier recalls that outside the studio “you had plenty of liberty with Billie Holiday because she was that kind of a singer. She slid all around the changes. You could play almost anything behind her, as long as you didn’t play a wrong note. A lot of the music was based on head arrangements, except when we went into the studio. Then, of course, we had written arrangements, which were different. If you listen to any of her recordings, you’ll hear the bass is just basic playing—good, steady, and solid. I didn’t play any flourishes or anything.”
For a number of reasons tied to contracts and studio expenses, artists may adopt special performance strategies for recording sessions. When, as is commonly the case, a company absorbs the costs of recording studio operations and pays improvisers an hourly rate for sessions, it endeavors to limit each album’s studio time. Should contracts stipulate that, beyond the initial session payment, a company pay band leaders (and in some instances supporting players) royalties on the basis of record sales, it commonly debits studio charges and numerous other expenses associated with the album’s production from the musicians’ accounts before allowing them to share in a recording’s profits. Aware that performance errors may require recording multiple takes of pieces, each take having direct economic consequences, and aware, too, that they may not have the power to correct problems to their satisfaction in every part, musicians sometimes work out more formal improvisational sketches for recording sessions than for concerts. At the extreme, they occasionally compose complete models for solos and accompanying parts.22
Differing concerns about music ownership can influence recorded improvisation as well. Don Pate describes a bass player who refrained from introducing his “most advanced material” on recordings, fearing that others would copy them more easily than they could from his live performances. Pate himself does not share this anxiety. He views recordings, rather, as a useful medium for documenting the authorship of his most recent ideas. “If other people can cop my ideas from records and do more than I can with them,” he adds with characteristic bravado, “they’re welcome to them.”
In response to the changing technology of recording over the years, improvisers have contended with a number of artificial conditions imposed on performances in order to enhance their recorded sound. During the era of acoustical recording from the late nineteenth century to the twenties of this century, groups arranged themselves in the studio so as to balance the single signal that the recording horn of early machines could receive. To achieve this, the musicians adapted to unfamiliar physical arrangements of instruments and, at times, even modified their instrumentation to accommodate the equipment’s limits for mechanical reproduction and processing of particular instruments’ sounds. “Tuba or bass saxophone or the pianist’s left hand” commonly substituted for string bass. At times, drummers reduced their instrumentation to woodblocks, the rims of snare and bass drums, and cymbals, whose use they restrained. Moreover, brass players sometimes faced “the side wall of the studio” instead of playing into the recording horn so that the sounds of their instruments would overwhelm neither the recording equipment nor the music. These restrictions eased around 1925 with the advent of electrical recording techniques.23
Since the development in the fifties of two-track magnetic tape and multitrack recording, companies have favored other strategic practices in the studio. Engineers sometimes separate musicians with acoustic dividers so that the sound does not bleed from one microphone to another. The isolation of individual parts on different tape tracks maximizes the possibilities for subsequent editing and facilitates potential subtle adjustments in balancing the different parts when engineers transfer their signals and combine them, for the final master tape, on the two main channel tracks, right and left.
Acoustic dividers sometimes sacrifice the visual contact that normally assists interaction among improvisers, thus requiring players to use headphones to hear each other clearly. At an extreme, studios may even record band members separately. In such cases, individuals improvise their parts to the pre-recorded performances of other players, or a mechanical click track that delineates the music’s beat, or a combination of the two. Although such practices provide the cleanest isolation of parts, they also minimize the possibilities for musical interplay among artists. Moreover, the mechanical beat of the click track does not accommodate the subtle ebb and flow of time that is an important aspect of the rhythmic life of collective improvisations. Although they eventually oblige, young performers initially find such contrivances to be unnerving.
Some engineers regard the model of a clean sound favored by certain other studios as sterile. To achieve a more acceptable sound, they attempt to create as natural an environment in the studio as possible. Such technicians minimize the separation of musicians and balance instruments through the strategic placement of different microphones, creating the final mix during the actual recording. Correspondingly, they strive to capture the rich timbral blend of instruments typical in live performances, including the unique effect on the group sound of the original room’s acoustics. Some engineers apply the same technique during a recording session that they use when recording a live performance for projected release to the public.
Engineers favoring a live or organic mix accept the limitations of the technique and its risks. If they wrongly place a performance mike, the resultant imbalance of the recording is difficult to change later. Organic mixes similarly reduce potential editing. Accepting this challenge, musicians take special pride in successful first-take performances, which are not only relatively flawless technically but possess a spirit of freshness that is difficult to maintain over the course of multiple takes. In fact, many improvisers and engineers prefer to live with minor performance flaws in order to realize their ideals for sound quality and spontaneous expression. The Blue Note recordings of the fifties and sixties remain a testament to the success of such ventures, having intelligently overcome the studio’s normal obstacles to simulate the excitement of live performances.
Record companies differ in the control they exert over the content and production of albums. They exercise great power simply because they offer record contracts to a few groups among many within the jazz community. In some instances, a company actually creates bands, fashioning them according to budgetary concerns and the tastes of its producers. The company may maintain a house rhythm section, adding different
soloists to create new bands. They may also rotate positions among a basic collection of artists, featuring different individuals as band leaders from album to album. Groups may also consist of a mixture that draws from performers under contract to the company, artists on contractual loan from other recording companies, and newcomers to the jazz community, including players at various stages of musical development. It can be a rude shock to a band leader who, having worked for years with the same players to cultivate a unique group sound, discovers that producers have the power to remake the band they invited to record, replacing any or all the other members of the original group.
Having put together a band or having contracted with an established one, companies afford improvisers various degrees of artistic freedom in the studio. Over the years, artists have typically had the most control when working with smaller independent companies such as Blue Note, Riverside, Contemporary, and Impulse! rather than major companies such as Victor, Decca, and Columbia.24 Beyond general ideological differences distinguishing the major from the independent labels, the policies and procedures of individual companies, and the nature of the artistic productions they support, are influenced by numerous considerations, including, always, the fluctuating economy and changes in public taste, and, from time to time, such specific crises as the 1942 American Federation of Musicians’ recording ban and shortages of raw materials for records.25
At one extreme, management may simply play a supporting role, relying upon artists to conduct and evaluate their own performances. More often, management interacts more directly with artists to dictate various terms for recordings and strike compromises between artist issues and commercial concerns. Company employees with overlapping spheres of influence, such as producers, musical arrangers, and those designated as artist and repertory (A and R) personnel, commonly play a role in developing material for recordings. In an effort to reach a broad commercial market, they sometimes require that artists choose compositions from a prescribed list of pieces with popular appeal, at times insisting on particular genres.26 During the swing era, the vigorous efforts of music publishers to promote their latest popular song acquisitions were themselves an enticement for record companies to turn out recorded versions of commercially successful pieces, taking advantage of the publicity surrounding them.27
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